Other than having incorrect memory ordered and some other issues, I was unable to have ESXi 4.0.0 see the HP StorageWorks 42B HBA.

As shown in the screenshot below, I was unable to have ESXi 4.0.0 build 261974 see the vmhba after a fresh install.

After doing a few searches on Google and finding various posts about people having problems with installing 2 of the quad port cards but managed to get it going after upgrading the drivers or ESXi, I decided to try upgrading ESXi from 4.0.0 to 4.1.0 (http://terenceluk.blogspot.com/2010/09/updating-vsphere-esxi-from-40-to-41.html) assuming that the newer ESXi would may have the right drivers for the HBA.

The upgrade went without a hitch but I was still unable to see the HBA after getting ESXi to version 4.1.0 so I went back to the internet to do some searches and found that there were ways to install additional drivers for ESXi and coincidentally, you use the VMware vSphere CLI to do it (see my previous post about why this was coincidental). The next step I did was to try and find the HBA drivers. Through reviewing the description the BOM, I find the description:

Based on what I found on the HCL, it does look like it’s supported so I went back to the VMware downloads section to try and find drivers offered directly from that site. What I found was the following:

DescriptionThis driver CD release includes support for version 2.1.1.1 of the Brocade BFA driver on ESX/ESXi 4.0. This BFA driver supports products based on the Brocade 825, 815, 425, and 415 Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBA).

Looking into the offline-bundle folder, I found the following package:

BRCD-bfa-2.1.1.1-00000-offline_bundle-285864.zip

Drilling into that .zip package showed that it contains the following:

metadata.zip

vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-bfa-400.2.1.1.1-1OEM.x86_64.vib

This was when I was sure that this package was the one I wanted so i went ahead and extracted the BRCD-bfa-2.1.1.1-00000-offline_bundle-285864.zip package then went back to vSphere CLI to try and update the drivers with it:

The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the c

hanges to be effective.

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>

Success!

Once the update completed, I went and fired up VI Client, connected to the host, navigated to the storage adapters section and now I can see the vmhba listed!

Now that I got the HBA to show up on the host, I knew I needed to do one last step and that was to ensure that I did use the right driver because once this goes into production, we won’t be able to do any more testing with it.

Within the storage adapters section, ESXi lists the adapters as Brocade-425/825:

… so I went ahead to look up the reference guide on the Brocade site to determine if there was a cross reference guide available and indeed there was:

Good post. I followed the guide as I have the a very similar setup (same fiber card) and it seemed to work, but under storage adapters it says UNKNOWN instead of Brocade 425/And gives no link even though it is connected. I'm assuming that you didn't have to do anything special after the installation to enable the card, it just worked straight after the reboot?

Hi, you're correct that I didn't have to do anything special. What I would recommend at this point is if you've downloaded the same driver I used and provided, check to see if there is a newer driver available. Also, what ESX/ESXi version are you using? I was using 4.1 in this example.

Hi, I am running ESXi 4.0, since the drivers (vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-bfa_400.1.1.1.1-1.0.4.00000.175274)I tried using would not install on ESXi 4.1. I have installed the drivers you used and the status has not changed display wise, it still says UNKNOWN, but now my SAN switch has link so I guess it works. Have not had time to test it yet.